The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for administering surveys.
Surveys are an effective tool for gathering data on a variety of facts and opinions. Surveys can aid many businesses and organizations in defining and/or achieving their goals and policies. A typical survey constitutes a set of questions which are distributed to a group of people having appropriate characteristics. The group returns responses to the questions, and the responses are assembled to determine, for example, average responses and majority responses.
Surveys may be efficiently conducted via computer networks, such as the Internet. For example, a joint project by Juno Online Services, L.P. and Market Facts, Inc. conducts surveys online. Similarly, SURVEY.NET conducts surveys and questionnaires and provides the results online.
In addition, respondents may be paid for taking a survey. For example, TESTNOW.COM, created by Concept test, Inc. asks its registrants to test various web site concepts and fill out an online questionnaire. Payments are provided for each completed questionnaire. Similarly, Feedback Express is a web site at www.feedbackexpress.com that pays Internet users for providing feedback about concepts they review online.
Surveys conducted via computer networks have not had wide success. Such surveys are particularly susceptible to a variety of attacks that compromise the integrity of collected data. Since surveys conducted via computer networks allow respondents to participate remotely, they are unsupervised and may submit random responses rather than meaningful responses. Even worse, an appropriately designed computer program can submit random or otherwise meaningless responses while appearing to be one or more respondents. Since such surveys are not widely accepted, few people participate in these surveys and those that do generally cannot be paid well. This results in a xe2x80x9cchicken-and-eggxe2x80x9d problem, where lack of respondents causes poor acceptance of the surveys, which in turn discourages respondents from participating.
Businesses could potentially benefit from surveys conducted via a computer network. However, there is always the possibility that a significant part of data collected from the survey will be inaccurate or otherwise untrustworthy.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a method and apparatus for conducting surveys that reduced or eliminated the above-described shortcomings.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus for conducting surveys that reduces or eliminates the shortcomings of known systems.
In accordance with the present invention, a controller such as an online service provider computer or an Internet Service Provider (ISP) computer receives a survey including survey questions from a client desiring to have a survey conducted. The controller creates respondent questions based on the survey questions. The controller also selects one or more respondents from a list of possible respondents, such as a list of customer accounts. The respondent questions are transmitted to the selected respondents. Responses corresponding to the respondent questions are received.
The controller applies an inconsistency test to the responses to generate an inconsistency test result. The inconsistency test determines if the responses originate from computers or humans not paying attention to the questions. Based on the inconsistency test result, a fraud signal may be generated. The fraud signal may result in several actions, such as the controller ignoring the responses received from the corresponding respondent, reducing or eliminating payment to the respondent, transmitting a message of reprimand to the respondent, and/or barring the respondent from future participation in surveys.